London Korean Film Festival 2010: The Man From Nowhere, I Saw The Devil, The Housemaid, Secret Reunion

It's taken a long, long time for me to get round to it, but, finally, here it it is: my snapshot of the 5th London Korean Film Festival (November 5-23). I didn't get around to seeing all that much of the programme, but I did manage to see five new, as-yet-unreleased-here films, almost all of which were very much worth seeing. The film that opened the event, Lee Jeong-beom's The Man From Nowhere (above), certainly did so with a bang; it might be too violent to breakout in the UK (or not enough – more on that later), but director Lee's second feature is a very assured action drama.

I met Lee before I saw the movie, and, characteristically for a South Korean director, he was very modest about his efforts. It's true that it's not the work of a high-falutin' auteur (or “cinema kid”, as he put it), but The Man From Nowhere certainly has a lot of energy, and its simplicity is actually very refreshing. It features Mother star Won Bin, now a massive deal in the east, as Cha Tae-sik, a former government agent who gave up the job after the death of his wife. Tae-sik now runs a suburban pawn shop, where his only friend is a little girl, So-mi, whose mother, Hyo-jeong, is a dancer at a local nightclub. During a drugs raid there, Hyo-jeong steals the stash and makes off with it, but the gangsters pursue her and both she and her daughter are kidnapped. Tae-sik, who realises now what a shitty life So-mi has been living, comes out of retirement to find the gang, entering a world of intrigue, double-crosses and some really, really stupid policemen...

In a nutshell, this is pretty much Leon meets A History Of Violence, but the characterisations are fresh and appealing, and though Won-Bin doesn't exactly look as though he'd break your spine, he certainly owns a tough-guy role in a way that, say, Brighton Rock's Sam Riley doesn't. There's a little sentiment towards the end but, for the most part, this isn't a terribly sentimental movie: a subplot involves the harvesting of human body parts and child trafficking, while the very, very violent climax consistently focusses on a pair of gleefully gouged-out eyeballs. The editing is slightly haphazard – scenes that appear to have played out are cut away from and then quickly cut back to – but this is an above-average pulp thriller with crowd-pleasing gunfights and car chases.

Not so crowd-pleasing but definitely worth seeing, if your stomach can stand it, is Kim Jee-woon's berserk I Saw The Devil (left), which I had to watch with an audience at the Odeon West End right before going onstage to run a Q&A with director Kim. Later on, I discussed the film with Frightfest's Paul McEvoy, who questioned my concerns that it might run into trouble with the BBFC. Speaking personally, I think it's one of the most violent films I've ever seen – and I've seen Martyrs. Which means that you have been warned. But having said that, it is violence employed with meaning; normally, extreme violence is used sparingly to establish a tone, but here it is hammered home – sometimes literally – throughout the film's long, 140-minute-plus running time.

There are now several cuts of the film, but the one director Kim brought was the “export” version, which is the Korean version plus some stuff that was considered too strong for the domestic market (who didn't go to see it anyway). In synopsis form, it appears to be a simple cat-and-mouse story, but I Saw The Devil is far more than that – the cat finds the mouse very early on in proceedings, and goes on to torment him for some 90 minutes – until the mouse finds some pretty tricky ways to fight back. In the broadest sense, it's really a serial-killer movie, since that's what kick-starts the story: the girlfriend of top secret agent Dae-hoon (Byung Hun-Lee) is brutally murdered – and I mean brutally murdered – by the psychopathic Kyung-chul (Choi Min-sik), so Dae-hoon sets out for revenge. But not simply to kill him – Dae-hoon wants to torment Kyung-chul both physically and mentally, feeding his prey a homing device that enables the hunter to find him at any time.

The violence here is astonishing; outside a Saw movie, I don't think I've seen so many varied implements so inventively used. But director Kim never hides behind camp or even metaphor; what he's doing here is making a claustrophobic statement about the futility of vengeance: Dae-hoon and Kyung-chul just keep going at each other (and I have to say that Choi Min-sik is absolutely unbelievable in the role). The other great thing about I Saw The Devil, though, is that its repetitions never get boring – director Kim throws in so many diversions (including a cannibal couple and a pair of rival psychopaths) that it feels like a bizarre and bloody Pilgrim's Progress. I Saw The Devil is out here in May (I think), and it will be interesting to see what fans of his previous works – The Good, The Bad, The Weird especially – will make of it. It may be a little too long, but it's a provocative film that's healthily aware of its transgressions. I heard someone grumbling about having “problems with the third act” but that's why I love Korean directors. They don't give a fuck!

The festival ended with Im Sang-soo's The Housemaid, which was criminally overlooked at Cannes this year. While everyone was raving about Uncle Bore-me, director Im's warped psychological study of evil – a remake, in name only, I suspect, of a famous 1960 Korean movie – went ignored. Which is a shame, since, on second viewing, it really is an interesting piece of work. To recap: a naive blue-collar girl gets a job with a rich family. The woman of the household is heavily pregnant with her second child, so her sexually frustrated husband starts an affair with the maid. When the maid gets pregnant, her superior tells the wife's mother, who instigates a campaign of harassment in the hopes of making the girl give up her child, either by miscarriage or abortion.

The original sounds to be much more of a crazy-nanny movie, but in this movie the rich family are definitely the bad guys, and it's their frightening sense of entitlement that gives the film its scares. But director Im has a lot more going on than just that, and what struck me on seeing it again is just how weird some of his choices are. The beginning, for example, shows a girl committing suicide in a busy street; it's there for a reason, but the reason is more poetic than strictly narrative. The same goes for the final scene, which is both inexplicable and deliciously surreal. The result is a very edgy psychodrama that might make for an interesting double-bill with Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan.

Two other films I caught up with on DVD; the first, Moss, is based on a comic strip and threw me so much in the first half-hour, with all its digressions, that I eventually gave up. Much more fun was Secret Reunion (left), a political thriller that flirts with bad taste by having one of its two male leads, Ji-won (Kang Dong-won), be a young, committed spy working for North Korea. When we meet him, Ji-Won is on a mission that ends in bloodshed, under the aegis of the mysterious super-agent Shadow, and National Intelligence Service agent Han-gyu (Song Kang-ho) is on the case. Ji-Won escapes, Han-gyu is fired by the NSI for failing to follow procedure, and six years pass. The next time the two men meet, Ji-won is still a spy, but Han-gyu is now a private investigator who finds runaway Vietnamese brides for heartbroken farmers. Han-gyu offers Ji-won a job, but he secretly plans to shop him to the NSI for a reward. Ji-won, meanwhile, thinks Han-gyu is working undercover, so he accepts the offer, sending back coded reports to the North Korean government.

As I understand it, Secret Reunion was a big hit in South Korea, and it's not hard to see why. As with The Man From Nowhere, it hits all the right action beats, but the buddy-movie subplot is what counts. Song Kang-ho – who played The Weird in The Good, The Bad, The Weird and Priest Sang-hyeon in Park Chan-wook's darkly comic vampire thriller Thirst – is an incredibly charismatic actor, both funny and charming, while Kang Dong-won is the perfect foil. The ending is cheesy, but it's still effective, and what surprised me about the films I saw at the LKFF is how geared they were towards an audience. There were clichés, yes, and some long stretches, but Korean cinema is refreshingly open to genre. Every director I spoke to maintained that their goal was just one thing: to be not boring, and as a showcase for that sentiment, this year's event definitely scored big.